Disabled vanadium for better battery life - a test

mattachu

Hello all, running a pixel 8 with the latest graphene version installed and play services.

Been having dramas with battery life the last little while I'm talking an hour or so browsing the internet and using my phone and it would drop 20 to 30% which didn't seem reasonable to me. The one app that always stuck out in the battery usage section was vanadium and I was only browsing this forum and a couple of other websites. Nothing with heavy video or photos or anything like that so I tried installing the brave browser and messed around with the settings to get it how I like it and notice that it used a hell of a lot less battery than vanadium doing the same tasks.

So in the interest of science I disabled vanadium and for the past few days have just been using Brave and using my phone as I normally would and have noticed a dramatic increase in battery life.

Just thought I'd let other people know in case you're experiencing the same issues. I understand vanadium was designed for the security of graphene OS users, but as I'm not a targeted individual I felt okay giving it a try.

Seems to be working pretty good so far. I have about 3 and 1/2 hours screen on time today and I'm down from 80% to 42% as I make this post

Would be interesting to know if other people have been experiencing the same sort of battery issues and trying what I've done and reporting back

Jarbo

Yeah, I'm seeing something similar with Vanadium. It's the background usage that concerns me. Today it's used 25% battery from 13 minutes of screen time and 6 minutes of background usage.

I'm going to try something else and see if that makes a difference.

lars

I've often wondered about the battery usage of browsers, but I suspect it's pretty hard to do a fair test of one browser against another. I don't use a browser in a consistent way from day to day, so I wouldn't expect the battery usage to be consistent.

Even if I (for example) used some kind of bot to exercise the browsers in repeatable ways, there would still be differences caused by differences in ambient light (screen brightness), signal strength, etc.

I'd love to know if somebody had done systematic, thorough testing in this area.

Lars.

gta3

U cud try ironfox to see if it improves further still

Box

Having them same issue as well. My Pixel 9 Pro went from 37% to 0 over night. I'll try Ironfox and see what happens :)

mattachu

Update, I no longer do this. I use vanadium for logging into accounts etc and just use brave for everything else. Does vanadium use more battery? I can’t tell for sure. I get similar battery usage on safari on my iPhone so it could just be the nature of web browsing these days.

rhino

mattachu
I disable Vanadium altogether, and only enable it when it suits me.
I don't like that it had a lot of background usage.
There are no apps that I have installed that require Vanadium.

mattachu

rhino

Yeah I was annoyed at the battery usage but I believe it’s not really vanadium as other browsers and safari on iPhone have similar battery usage stats over time.

Vanadium also has some really cool anti exploit features enabled by default if you have a read of the features page it goes through everything it does by default. I now use it when I’m logging onto sites that require my identity (banking etc) and just use brave for everything else. I messed around with ironfox from accrescent a couple of days ago and it’s okay, got some cool private dns stuff by default which I checked with rethink dns. But I already use private dns for the whole system so I’m cool with brave for play and vanadium for sign ins.